Decidability and Complexity Issues for Infinite-State Processes

Jirí Srba

2003

Abstract:

This thesis studies decidability and complexity border-lines for algorithmic verification of infinite-state systems. Verification techniques for finite-state processes are a successful approach for the validation of reactive programs operating over finite domains. When infinite data domains are introduced, most of the verification problems become in general undecidable. By imposing certain restrictions on the considered models (while still including infinite-state spaces), it is possible to provide algorithmic decision procedures for a variety of properties. Hence the models of infinite-state systems can be classified according to which verification problems are decidable, and in the positive case according to complexity considerations.

This thesis aims to contribute to the problems mentioned above by studying decidability and complexity questions of equivalence checking problems, i.e., the problems whether two infinite-state processes are equivalent with regard to some suitable notion of behavioural equivalence. In particular, our interest is focused on strong and weak bisimilarity checking within classical models of infinite-state processes.

Throughout the thesis, processes are modelled by the formalism of process rewrite systems which provides a uniform classification of all the considered classes of infinite-state processes.

We begin our exposition of infinite-state systems by having a closer look at the very basic model of labelled transition systems. We demonstrate a simple geometrical encoding of the labelled systems into unlabelled ones by transforming labels into linear paths of different lengths. The encoding preserves the answers to the strong bisimilarity checking and is shown to be effective e.g. for the classes of pushdown processes and Petri nets. This gives several decidability and complexity corollaries about unlabelled variants of the models.

We continue by developing a general decidability theorem for commutative process algebras like deadlock-sensitive BPP (basic parallel processes), lossy BPP, interrupt BPP and timed-arc BPP nets. The introduced technique relies on the tableau-based proof of decidability of strong bisimilarity for BPP and we extend it in several ways to provide a wider applicability range of the technique. This, in particular, implies that all the mentioned classes of commutative process algebras allow for algorithmic checking of strong bisimilarity.

Another topic studied in the thesis deals with finding tight complexity estimates for strong and weak bisimilarity checking. A novel technique called existential quantification is explicitly described and used to show that the strong bisimilarity and regularity problems for basic process algebra and basic parallel processes are PSPACE-hard. In case of weak bisimilarity checking of basic parallel processes the problems are shown to be again PSPACE-hard -- this time, however, also for the normed subclass.

Finally we consider the problems of weak bisimilarity checking for the classes of pushdown processes and PA-processes. Negative answers to the problems are given -- both problems are proven to be undecidable. The proof techniques moreover solve some other open problems. For example the undecidability proof for pushdown processes implies also undecidability of strong bisimilarity for prefix-recognizable graphs.

The thesis is concluded with an overview of the state-of-the-art for strong and weak bisimilarity problems within the classes from the hierarchy of process rewrite systems.

Available as PostScript, PDF.

 

Last modified: 2004-03-29 by webmaster.